Only many months later I learned, by piecing together certain facts, that old Morley Tarrant was an expert photographer and maker of printer's "blocks." Slowly it became plain that Rayne, having been betrayed by the astute American crook, had met him in Edinburgh and with devilish malice aforethought, had contrived to get him to handle the glass cube which served as a paper-weight, and which I had quite innocently conveyed to the old hunchback, who had succeeded in taking the finger-prints and by photography transferring them upon the surgical rubber glove, thin as paper--really a false skin--which Duperre had worn over his hands when he and his associates made an attack upon the bank. By that means Martyn's finger-prints were left upon the safe door. Duperre had previously taken out Martyn, whom one of his friends, a woman, had drugged, so that he lay in that furnished house near Maldon for two days unconscious. Hence he was unable to give any accurate account of his movements on the night in question, or prove an alibi, and was, in consequence, convicted. Rayne, the man with the abnormal criminal brain, had, by that ingenious _coup_, not only contrived to spirit away to the Continent a sum of eighty thousand pounds in negotiable securities, but had also sent to a long term of penal servitude the man who had attempted to betray him. CHAPTER V CONCERNS MR. BLUMENFELD The pleasant high road between Leamington and Coventry runs straight over the hills to Kenilworth, but a few miles farther on there are cross-roads, the right leading into Stoneleigh and the left to Kirby Corner and over Westwood Heath into a crooked maze of by-roads by which one can reach Berkswell or Barston. It was over that left-hand road that I was driving Rayne and Lola in the Rolls in the grey twilight of a wintry evening. We had driven from London, and both Rayne and the girl I so admired were cramped and tired. "Look!" shouted Lola suddenly as we took a turn in the road. "There's the lodge! On the left there. That's Bradbourne Hall!" "Yes, that's it, Hargreave!" said Rudolph, and a few moments later I turned the car through the high wrought-iron gates which stood open for us, and we sped up the long avenue of leafless trees which led to the fine country mansion at which we were to be guests. Bradbourne Hall was a great old-world Georgian house, half covered with ivy, and the appearance of the grave, white-haired butler who opened the door showed it to be the residence of a man of wealth and discernment. That Edward Blumenfeld, its owner, was fabulously wealthy everyone in the City of London knew, for his name was one to conjure with in high finance, and though the dingy offices of Blumenfeld and Hannan in Old Broad Street were the reverse of imposing, yet the financial influence of the great house often made itself felt upon the Bourses of Paris, Brussels and Rome.